A new study shows that 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. OK, not really, but it does show that 42% of healthy brain activity is the minimum threshold for consciousness.

Disorders of consciousness, also referred to as coma when severe enough, can be a difficult situation to assess sufficiently to make reliable predictions about outcome. Part of the problem is that once someone is not able to maintain consciousness, we lose much of the neurological exam, and therefore it becomes more difficult to assess brain function other than to say that they are not conscious.

Types of coma

Two types of coma in particular are of interest: the persistent vegetative state, also called unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS), and the minimally conscious state (MCS). Both are severe impairments of consciousness. In UWS, by definition, the patient may have sleep-wake cycles, open their eye, have roving eye movements, and grimace, but they do not have any interaction with their environment. They do not respond to voice, look at faces, or move in response to stimuli.

As Steve Novella and my good buddy pointed out a few days ago (and as Steve pointed out in an interview on NPR), Dr. Steven Laureys admitted that Rom Houben, the unfortunate victim of a car crash that left him in what had been diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state, was in fact not able to communicate through the woo known as facilitated communication. This came as no surprise to anyone who has followed FC over the years. In fact, what had come as a surprise is that Dr. Laureys could have been so easily taken in by pseudoscience that had been so thoroughly debunked in the 1990s. To his credit, though, after a period of initially stubbornly defending FC, he relented and allowed objective testing, and the result was predictable. It took a few days, but the English language world is learning of the failure of FC in Houben’s case:

The sceptics said it was impossible – and it was. The story of Rom Houben of Belgium, which made headlines worldwide last November when he was shown to be “talking”, was today revealed to have been nothing of the sort.

Dr Steven Laureys, one of the doctors treating him, acknowledged that his patient could not make himself understood after all. Facilitated communication, the technique said to have made Houben’s apparent contact with the outside world possible, did not work, Laureys declared.

“We did not have all the facts before,” he said. “To me, it’s enough to say that this method doesn’t work.” Just three months ago the doctor was proclaiming that Houben had been trapped in his own body, the victim of a horrendous misdiagnosis, and only rescued from his terrible plight thanks to medical advances.

What was not reported is that skeptics were involved in the testing of Rom Houben. I recently received a statement from the Belgian Skeptics (SKEPP):(more…)